St. Louis Flares Up Over Bosnia Soccer Celebrations at Busch Stadium

The flares lit by Bosnian soccer fans at last week's international friendly game did no damage to Busch Stadium, but they set off a firestorm on social media last week as St. Louisans reacted in ways that were by turns curious, angry and downright xenophobic.

Busch Stadium is fresh on the minds of most in St. Louis. Just three weeks before, 47,000 baseball fans packed the place to watch the St. Louis Cardinals take on the Boston Red Sox in Game 5 of the World Series. (It didn't go so well.)

The scene Monday was very different: A mostly Bosnian crowd made up for the smatterings of empty seats by cheering, jumping and singing constantly with electrifying frenzy. Even as the Bosnia-Herzegovina national team trailed by two to Argentina, fans pulled out hand-held road flares, a signal of celebration in countries where soccer -- not baseball -- is king.

"That's how you cheer on your team," says Erna Grbic, 31, whose family was one of the first to move to St. Louis from Bosnia, eventually establishing south city's Grbic Restaurant. "That's how you show respect for your team. We're going to do it the way we would do it in Bosnia."

Riverfront Times

Bosnia fans cheer.

When the long weekend of celebrating was over and everyone checked their Twitter feeds the next morning, Bosnians were heartbroken to find that St. Louisans weren't focused on the epic parade leading to the stadium or the frenzy of fan support, Grbic says.

Instead, they were focused on the flares. In posts escalating from irritated to upset to racist, St. Louisans demanded answers from security about allowing fire in their baseball stadium.

Twitter had burst Bosnia's proverbial bubble -- one that had been growing in St. Louis for twenty years.

Read why Monday's game meant so much to St. Louis' Bosnian community and see more online reaction after the jump.

Flares are horrible! I have a scar to prove how dangerous they are...from a fellow soccer fan while I was at a game in Fenton. Sparklers, sure. But flares throw off still-lit chunks, one of which burned my arm.

I do not see the racism. People seem to have a problem with the act that I have no doubt would have caused problems at a Blues game, going unimpeded and unpunished in this situation. I don't see any specific statements towards any race (white, Asian, black, etc...). Yes there are blanket statements to the Bosnian community, but I didn't think they were their own race. No more than Turkish, Germans, Moldovans etc (again) are anyway.

I think the racism claims are a little exaggerated. We simply have a culture where it is commonly understood that burning magnesium in a crowd is generally frowned upon. And if that was done by anyone at a major sports event they would be gang tackled by security and interviewed as a potential terrorist.

This is really sad. My St. Louis watches baseball and hockey while playing soccer. I remember the fun when SLU had a shot of the NCAA championship in 1988 and Edwardsville was also competitive. We had a MISL team and talked about the possibility of professional soccer taking off in the US (with Pele as the figure head).

I hope the people of St. Louis can rally round more international soccer events in the future. Gotta go now and pick up my son from football practice (you call it soccer).

No offense, but this is a non-story. If all of St. Louis were responsible for our region's ~100 racist, xenophobic, sexist, homophobic anonymous individuals who incessantly spew bile on STL social media, then we'd be a horrible place to live indeed.

Luckily they're an extreme (and extremely sad) minority. And St. Louis is better than that. I (we) love the Bosnian presence here and share in their excitement.

@lcstrategy ur so f dumb ur the one that needs to go back to history. First of all not all Bosnians are muslim if u didnt know second of all ur talking about discriminating really y dont you read ur own commants and third of all stop ur just bumd.